Tuesday, June 10, 2014

4 Months of LootCrate

I've been enamored with the idea of monthly subscriptions for a good little while now. I'm not talking about magazine subscriptions, but receiving actual physical goods once a month. I have, however never been able to justify shelling out $40 every 30 days for the Bacon of the month club (as tempting as that genuinely is). It wasn't until about five months ago that an advertisement for Loot Crate popped up in my Facebook news-feed that I bit.

LootCrate is a monthly subscription service that caters largely to nerds/geeks/what-have-you. Falling somewhere in that demographic I was drawn to the idea of receiving monthly boxes full of toys, candy, stickers, T-shirts and other junk. I say junk because, as absolutely fun as it was, that's all it really ended up amounting to. I paid $20 a month, I received a themed crate. This crate was a small cardboard box filled with items pertaining to that months theme. In the four months that I was a subscriber the themes were: "Warriors", "Titans", "Dragons" and "Adventure".

It's legitimately a solid idea, and great fun for those that it works for. My main problem was this: I wasn't geeky enough for it. The boxes each catered to a few select fan bases each month. I increasingly realized I fell into too few of these categories for it to be worth my money. I found myself watching cartoons and playing games for no other reason than I knew my next crate would be themed off of them. It was a fantastic way to broaden my nerdy horizons, but it was expensive and time consuming and I became increasingly underwhelmed with the loot.

It's great if you enjoy it, and I really did enjoy it for a while, but in the end what I have to show for it is a shelf full of small figurines that are collecting dust, when I could have taken that $20 a month and purchase items far more tailored to my tastes. Still, I did end up with a pretty sweet bow tie.

Easily the best thing I received.

My next monthly subscription endeavor is BirchBox (that's my referral link!) it's a service that sends grooming samples once a month tailored to a profile you set up. Each month includes a "lifestyle" item that ranges from fitness jump ropes to tie clips (and bow ties!). These items are in addition to 4(ish) samples of men's grooming supplies. The idea being you try different things out, discover what you like and buy full sized items from their shop. The Men's subscription is $20 a month while Women's is $10 (the women's box doesn't come with aforementioned lifestyle item). I'll let you know how it turns out, but I'm legitimately excited about this one.